May 5, 2012

Last night, we were talking about that column in the NYT where lawprof Kevin Noble Maillard — who identifies himself as an enrolled member of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma — informed us that for "the Cherokee Nation, Warren is 'Indian enough;' she has the same blood quantum as Cherokee Nation Chief Bill John Baker." He said:

For non-Natives, this may be surprising. They expect to see 'high cheekbones,' as Warren described her grandfather as having, or tan skin. They want to know of pow wows, dusty reservations, sweat lodges, peyote and cheap cigarettes. When outsiders look at these ostensibly white people as members of Native America, they don’t see minorities. As a result, Warren feels she must satisfy these new birthers and justify her existence.

He also portrayed Native American lawprofs as such a small group — 0.5% of all lawprofs — that they'd all know about it — and enthuse about it — if one of them had gotten appointed at Harvard, and that didn't happen.

1. "The whole blood-quantum thing is a white man's criterion." (More on that here.)

2. "[T]he interesting part isn’t that she checked the Native American box; it’s that she unchecked it once it wouldn’t do her any more good. And that’s not a fake controversy"

Let me add some more issues:

3. These days tribes control the standards of who gets in, but what are their purposes? There are ideas about sovereignty, connected to political power and autonomy, but how can this definition carry over to other contexts and support affirmative action? A technical, genetic standard isn't narrowly tailored to notions about the benefits of "diversity," especially if no one can see or is even informed about who's supposed to be bringing the diversity.

4. Having a Native American faculty member is a point of pride for Harvard. It claims credit. But maybe it doesn't really have anyone behind that claim. Note the potential for collusion between a law school and faculty members who can plausibly be claimed to beef up the diversity statistic. The school may not really know or want to know the truth. It just hopes to get away with reporting a number that works to its credit. It's like the way law schools want to hear from their graduates that they have law jobs with good pay. They want to report that information to U.S. News to get better rank on the "Best Law Schools" list. If it's good for them, they'd rather not have to look into whether it's true. It's good. Who cares if it's true?

5. Elizabeth Warren claimed that she had herself listed in the AALS directory as a minority lawprof because she was hoping to get included in group of people like her. Professor Maillard assures NYT readers that Native American lawprofs are a close-knit group who know each other and support and take pride in each other. With such warm and welcoming arms outstretched, how is it that Warren never found her way into that group? One cynical theory is that Warren didn't really want to have to face them, because they might have questioned her authenticity. But that would mean she really did go on the list to make contact with appointments committees who would pull her up to a higher ranked school. And of course, that theory connects neatly with the point made at #2, supra: She unchecked the box once she got to Harvard.

6. Why did Maillard gratuitously insult those of us who are trying to figure this out by bringing up "high cheekbones, "tan skin," "pow wows, dusty reservations, sweat lodges, peyote and cheap cigarettes"? The abuse of affirmative action is a serious issue, and people who worry about it are not trading in old-fashioned stereotypes. It's more like Maillard is stereotyping us as backward and dumb. If that's intentional pushback, it ought to motivate us to look more deeply into the problem at hand. I'm not pushed back. That would be dumb.

The stuff about "unchecking" the box is nonsense. If you have kids, you're entitled to check the "dependents" box on your 1040 and get lots of undeserved support from the non-breeding young American males.

If you don't have income or the kids are grown, etc., you can uncheck the box! So what!

The crime is in the gummint's setting up of rules to steal wealth, income and opportunity from single non-breeding males and pass it to female breeders by means of the 1040, affirmative action, social security, food stamps, medicaid, etc.

The person who checks or does not check the box is not culpable and not to be chastised!

Again, the only criterion the Cherokee have for tribal office is that one be a descendant of a person on the Dawes lost. So when Malliard says that Warren's (asserted but unproven) Cherokee heritage is the same as the present elected Chief, he is misdirecting.

Perhaps a more correct way to put it is that Warren would be ineligible for tribal office. Indeed they would not consider her a member of the tribe. Warren does not have an ancestor on the Dawes list. If she did, we surely would have heard of it by now.

Just another sordid example of how the left approaches problems. Outcomes are not important-- only methods. Welfare and food stamps make liberals feel good about the benevolence of government and ignore how they destroy the self-worth of recipients. Low income housing projects devolve into crime- and cockroach-ridden hovels far worse than the ghettoes they replace. Diversity hiring calls into question the qualifications of those who benefit from it, even when they don't commit fraud to obtain it. These results are there for everyone to see, but liberals just can't, or won't.

The biggest issue for Cherokee tribal membership right now is whether the "Freedmen Cherokee" should be admitted. There are apparently several thousand descendants of freed slaves who claim tribal membership because they claim intermarriage with Cherokee after the Civil War. The previous tribal chief opposed their inclusion. The current tribal chief says that the tribe should "let the courts decide." This is just another way of saying he opposes it.

The Cherokee were horribly mistreated. As the only remaining eastern tribe with any power and cohesion in the early 1800's, they were a significant obstacle to the expansion of settlement in Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama and Upstate South Carolina. Leaders of the slaveholding south wanted the Cherokee out. A nasty war was fought, mostly by state militia, to achieve this. The result was the "Trail of Tears," the forced relocation of the Cherokee west to Oklahoma and elsewhere. It is one of the most sad and despicable events in early American history.

The principal architect and implementer of this policy of ethnic cleansing was Andrew Jackson, in his roles as military commander, Tennessee political power and President of the United States.

Jackson was a Democrat. The Democratic party policy was to cleanse the area of Native Americans to make room for more slaves.

Harvard would disclose who it is but they keep tracking the individual across the Harvard Yard and losing the trail. The Harvard Dean of Diversity Tracking said "You know how it is. You think you saw them, and then they just disappear. Gives you the shivers."

AA in the general sense is good. To identify any specific beneficiaries of AA is bad. That's it. That's the hokey pokey - what its all about. Its a necessary program because of past sins, which has unfairly benefited absolutely no one, and those it did benefit cannot be named.

Professor Althouse, you asked your commenters to square that circle a couple of posts ago, and got a little peeved when the commentariot refused to play along. But once you posed the problem what more was there to say?

Normally I think the children and spouse of a campaigning politician are off-limits...but Warren's 2 kids are grown adults.I would be interested to see if they took Momma's lead and listed themselves as Native Americans for job and school preferences.

If true, that would indicate that Warren was not just listing her alleged NA ancestry to raise an interesting part about herself for the benefit of her colleagues at law luncheons. But she was well aware it advantaged her over competitors and she told her kids "You ought to do the same scam. It might give you significant bonus points over rivals for the same job, prestigious school spot".

You were obviously not there when AA was first proposed. It was sold as an outreach program to minorities specifically blacks (equal opportunity). The idea that it was a diversity (benefiting everyone - haha) program (equal results) came many years later.

Before 1870 the Indians were still a competitive armed force, and their hunting parties killed the frontier settlers men but kidnapped the women and children of both genders to be servant labor for the tribe , and if they showed courage. then they could be adopted or married into the tribe.

The Indian's big problem for 100 yeras had been a near "last of the Mohican" style going extinct demographics because 75% of the Indians had died from the settler's European diseases. And the other tribes would defeat the withering away tribe.

The settlers' blood happened to carry immune antibodies. The DNA of the kidnapped new tribal members was one of the Indian's targets.

And that caused a major determination among settler men on the frontier to kill the stinking savages. Can you blame them?

So there were plenty of tribal half breeds born that migrated back to the European side in later marriages. as was shown in John Ford's movie classic.

Exactly. I have a friend from college who is a card-carrying member of the Choctaw tribe. I believe he is only 1/16 Choctaw. He openly admitted to me that the only reason he got tribal membership was so he could get free health insurance when he was unemployed.

The questions about affirmative action are real for sure.

I don't begrudge my Choctaw friend for making use of benefits he qualifies for. (Like all of us, he pays for them.) But shouldn't the government at least rethink the need for the benefits when the tribe starts admitting those with such thin blood?

Folks, you just do not understand. The NA check-box has already gotten her into Harvard and the Academic elite. There is no point of return. From that moment, her future was secured. She is a winner. Brown loses spectacularly. It is over, folks!

Claiming that Warren has the same amount of Cherokee blood as their Principal Chief is absurd. As the article mentions, he was brought up on Cherokee land. The blood isn't the point, the point is that he lived his life as Cherokee, and she didn't.

The Cherokee were horribly mistreated. As the only remaining eastern tribe with any power and cohesion in the early 1800's, they were a significant obstacle to the expansion of settlement in Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama and Upstate South Carolina. Leaders of the slaveholding south wanted the Cherokee out.

Shared an office for a year or two with a guy who claimed 1/4 Cherokee ancestry (and came from Oklahoma). His take on it, from his pure bred ancestor, is that the Cherokee, already being farmers, were able to hold onto the best farm land, when the White men came. They were also quite a ways along to assimilation, which may be why there has been a lot of inter-racial marriage through the last two centuries. He claimed that the White men wanted the Cherokee's farmland, and that was a good part of the reason that they were evicted and forceably moved to Oklahoma. However, there are accounts that suggest that minerals were also involved.

I think that one reason that the eviction of the Cherokee seems to egregious, at least to me, is that it wasn't a case of converting land to its highest and best use (at the time), when land previously used for hunting and gathering was converted to farmland, which supported many more people, but rather, was blatant theft, where the takers used the land almost identically to how it was used by those they took it from.

I believe Elizabeth Warren also started freaking out a little about checking the box with all of the talk of the "information superhighway". She knew that it was only a matter of time before some nosy kids started snooping around.

How does she know she’s a Cherokee maiden? Well, she cites her grandfather’s “high cheekbones,” and says the Indian stuff is part of her family “lore.” Which was evidently good enough for Harvard Lore School when they were looking to rack up a few affirmative-action credits. The former Obama special adviser to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and former chairperson of the Congressional Oversight Panel now says that “I listed myself in the directory in the hopes that it might mean that I would be invited to a luncheon, a group, something that might happen with people who are like I am,” and certainly not for personal career advancement or anything like that. Like everyone else, she was shocked, shocked to discover that, as the Boston Herald reported, “Harvard Law School officials listed Warren as Native American in the ’90s, when the school was under fierce fire for their faculty’s lack of diversity.”...Hallelujah! In the old racist America, we had quadroons and octoroons. But in the new post-racial America, we have — hang on, let me get out my calculator — duoettrigintaroons! Martin Luther King dreamed of a day when men would be judged not on the color of their skin but on the content of their great-great-great-grandmother’s wedding-license application. And now it’s here! You can read all about it in Elizabeth Warren’s memoir of her struggles to come to terms with her racial identity, Dreams from My Great-Great-Great-Grandmother.

Alas, the actual original marriage license does not list Great-Great-Great-Gran’ma as Cherokee, but let’s cut Elizabeth Fauxcahontas Crockagawea Warren some slack here. She couldn’t be black. She would if she could, but she couldn’t. But she could be 1/32nd Cherokee, and maybe get invited to a luncheon with others of her kind — “people who are like I am,” 31/32nds white, and they can all sit around celebrating their diversity together. She is a testament to America’s melting pot, composite pot, composting pot, whatever.

Just in case you’re having difficulty keeping up with all these Composite Americans, George Zimmerman, the son of a Peruvian mestiza, is the embodiment of endemic white racism and the reincarnation of Bull Connor, but Elizabeth Warren, the great-great-great-granddaughter of someone who might possibly have been listed as Cherokee on an application for a marriage license, is a heartwarming testimony to how minorities are shattering the glass ceiling in Harvard Yard. George Zimmerman, redneck; Elizabeth Warren, redskin. Under the Third Reich’s Nuremberg Laws, Ms. Warren would have been classified as Aryan and Mr. Zimmerman as non-Aryan. Now it’s the other way round. Progress!

At some point we started playing the house game and the continuous loosing has made us house players.

I believe we don't have to play their game to defeat them.

If we really believe that 'minorities' and all that word entails, are a means for democrats to keep people dependant.. then we should fight it/them from the outside.. not join in.. like we believe that crap.

My theory is that if we don't back off we are going to hurt Brown.. we hurt Brown the democrats see daylight.. they translate that into the slumping Obama.. and all because we couldn't hep ourselves but go after a lame candidate who didn't have a prayer to begin with.

Affirmative action is the rare government policy that tarnishes everyone it touches, to the point where it's most ardent proponents are afraid to be too publicly associated with it. Warren has become a laughingstock, while Harvard is afraid to name the lone native-American it claims as a faculty member.

The country may yet owe Warren and Harvard a debt of gratitude for helping to drive a stake through the last remaining vestige of de jure racial discrimination in America. That's a form of recognition that neither is likely to want.

If my grandfather was 1/2 Native American, but undocumented, and my wife is South African, though white, does that make my kids whitish american indian african? Which box do I check to make it easier for them to get into college and get federal funds for going to college, without getting arrested for mis-representing the racial makeup of my kids. MPW

The question is not whether she's "entitled" to claim NatAmer heritage. Remember, the legal justification used for affirmative action is that a diverse group brings benefits.

So, people should ask her what benefits her students have seen from her diversity. If she merely has "family lore" that she's proud of, then her students have been cheated of the benefits that diversity proponents promised.

Affirmative Action fails in the legal arena when argued as an entitlement, so whether she's entitled is actually a side issue.

1. "The whole blood-quantum thing is a white man's criterion." (More on that here.)

Good. Why are we following white man's solution to this problem. It says AA sucks.

2. "[T]he interesting part isn’t that she checked the Native American box; it’s that she unchecked it once it wouldn’t do her any more good. And that’s not a fake controversy"

Bad, and Who cares. The world is full of people trying to get ahead.

Let me add some more issues:

3. These days tribes control the standards of who gets in, but what are their purposes? There are ideas about sovereignty, connected to political power and autonomy, but how can this definition carry over to other contexts and support affirmative action? A technical, genetic standard isn't narrowly tailored to notions about the benefits of "diversity," especially if no one can see or is even informed about who's supposed to be bringing the diversity.

Confusing. AA is confusing. Drop this esoteric point. I assume this is about an election.

4. Having a Native American faculty member is a point of pride for Harvard. It claims credit. But maybe it doesn't really have anyone behind that claim. Note the potential for collusion between a law school and faculty members who can plausibly be claimed to beef up the diversity statistic. The school may not really know or want to know the truth. It just hopes to get away with reporting a number that works to its credit. It's like the way law schools want to hear from their graduates that they have law jobs with good pay. They want to report that information to U.S. News to get better rank on the "Best Law Schools" list. If it's good for them, they'd rather not have to look into whether it's true. It's good. Who cares if it's true?

Good, but too complex. Better would be "These people pushing this crap don't think the rules apply to them, in a meaningful way."

5. Elizabeth Warren claimed that she had herself listed in the AALS directory as a minority lawprof because she was hoping to get included in group of people like her. Professor Maillard assures NYT readers that Native American lawprofs are a close-knit group who know each other and support and take pride in each other. With such warm and welcoming arms outstretched, how is it that Warren never found her way into that group? One cynical theory is that Warren didn't really want to have to face them, because they might have questioned her authenticity. But that would mean she really did go on the list to make contact with appointments committees who would pull her up to a higher ranked school. And of course, that theory connects neatly with the point made at #2, supra: She unchecked the box once she got to Harvard.

Who cares about Elizabeth Warren. Put AA under fire, and they will throw her under the bus. Use her as a pawn.

6. Why did Maillard gratuitously insult those of us who are trying to figure this out by bringing up "high cheekbones, "tan skin," "pow wows, dusty reservations, sweat lodges, peyote and cheap cigarettes"? The abuse of affirmative action is a serious issue, and people who worry about it are not trading in old-fashioned stereotypes. It's more like Maillard is stereotyping us as backward and dumb. If that's intentional pushback, it ought to motivate us to look more deeply into the problem at hand. I'm not pushed back. That would be dumb.

I don't know who Maillard is. Please link. I don't care about intentions. Please tell me how AA has been good.

Only by providing equal opportunity can people obtain personal integrity, the cornerstone of strong society. Please tell me one good thing about AA that shows real societal progress. I don't see it.

I agree that Warren is not a villain for checking a box. But she does deserve the mockery she is getting, as should anyone who claims to be an "Indian" simply because some distant ancestor had high cheekbones.

BTW, I'm in MA and haven't heard mockery coming from Brown or his people. Mostly talk radio hosts and columnists. I agree he should stay above the fray. The jokes will probably die down soon, just like the Obama dog-eating ones did.

But the issue of AA itself should not go away. If AA has become so distorted that a person who is 31/32 white is used to fill the diversity hire slot at an elite University, then it has outlived it's original intent.

At this point, anyone who was born in this country should follow Warren's example and check the Native American box on applications. And if they are questioned they should simply tell the doubter to kiss their cheekbones.

Just another sordid example of how the left approaches problems. Outcomes are not important-- only methods. Welfare and food stamps make liberals feel good about the benevolence of government and ignore how they destroy the self-worth of recipients. Low income housing projects devolve into crime- and cockroach-ridden hovels far worse than the ghettoes they replace. Diversity hiring calls into question the qualifications of those who benefit from it, even when they don't commit fraud to obtain it. These results are there for everyone to see, but liberals just can't, or won't.

It's the elite mindset- along with being the self-proclaimed smartest people, they are also the self-proclaimed decent people. Decent people would never question the efficacy of progressive policies. To do so is to be branded ignorant and obscene- in other words, a Republican.

When you are as convinced of your superiority as today's "liberals", you need never question your motives or deeds.

Jason (the commenter) said...There's a very easy way to sort this out. Just get a picture of the Harvard Law School faculty and find the person with the highest cheek bones.

Don't be silly. You can't tell if a person is Native just by high cheek bones. The person we're looking for should also have tan skin and participate in pow wows on dusty reservations after chewing peyote and smoking cheap cigarettes in the sweat lodge.

Do you mean David Yeagley, direct descendant of Chief Bad Eagle, last of the Commanche?

Yeagley has been viciously set upon and roundly defamed by the prototypical leftists who claim to own the indian story and hold the right of gatekeeper for all indian narratives.

If I'm not mistaken, David has both Harvard and Yale credentials, is a composer and poet, and a remarkable scholar with remarkable insight on the American Indian, the assimilation of the european the emergence of the American nation.

Yeagley could use some help in fighting the campaign of defamation that has been brought against him.

That's the most disgusting irony of an Elizabeth Warren. Being a crypto-squaw on the long march to social justice, the tyrannical Warren's get a pass while remarkable historians and indian scholars like David Yeagley get the shovel brigade.

The lawyers here should take a closer look at David Yeagley's story. http://www.badeagle.com/legal-defense-fund/

He's got a few choice comments for Warren, as well. http://www.badeagle.com

The whole issue evokes some analysis of the movement for the US government to write reparations checks to black Americans for slavery. As I wrote on my former blog years ago, if that come to pass, you will be stunned at how many black people there are in America that we never knew of before.

Ann, I was wondering if you got it, now I see that you did. I have nothing to add but "right on!"

Incidentally, on reflection, the Popeye cartoon jokes probably should be left in the past. I made a few myself, and this whole issue is infuriating, but I wouldn't want to grow up in a society where people thought these kinds of jokes reflected on me, even if they were aimed at such a deserving target.

"Are we going Alinsky on Warren?

Its ugly"

It was ugly when it was done to Sarah Palin too, and W, and Bork. I know the Left's opinion of civil discourse in these cases was "we have to burn the village to save it" but the village is burned, get used to it.

When I was 5 or 6 my father enrolled the two of us in the Indian Guides. He took the name "Big Thunder" and I was "Little Lightning." We went on a hike thru the snow one winter and I lost a mitten. Dad got mad. Wow, it's so cool to be Native American!

Archie Bunker: The Indians don't vote.Michael 'Meathead' Stivic: Archie, the Indians were given the vote in 1924.Archie Bunker: I ain't talking about that, I'm saying they don't use their vote, like a fellow told me. They sell all their horses for booze and then they can't ride into town.Michael 'Meathead' Stivic: That is the *stupidest* thing I've ever heard.

Could someone direct me to a posted copy of E Warrens ancestors marriage certificate? 1. if it says OKLA on it and dated 1994 it is false. Okla became a state in 1907 before that was known as IT or Indian Territory. Dawes commission began in 1893. If this is a great-great-great grandmother, the dates dont add up. I am same age as EW and my ancestor of that level was born in 1800 and married in 1825.